Unfinished Business
by the ersatz diplomat
Summary: On the anniversary of her best friend's death, Karrin Murphy meets someone she didn't expect to see in Graceland Cemetery. Set after Ghost Story. Rated for language and violence. Work-in-Progress.
1. Off the Record

_The Dresden Files/Codex Alera is copyright Jim Butcher. This story is licensed under the Creative Commons as derivative, noncommercial fiction._

**(Really Long) Author's Note:** This was inspired by a prompt from the last Day By Drabble event (see below). Unfortunately I didn't finish in time, but the story turned out to be too long to post there, anyway. It ended up as a chaptered series from Murphy's perspective, set precisely a year after Harry's death, with a couple of flashbacks.

I think Murphy's smart enough to work it out (for the most part), having been a detective and all, but I can see her getting burned out pretty quick without Harry around, which is the direction I went with this fic. The hopeless romantic in me is rooting to see their reunion go like this, but it probably won't. Kind of nervous about posting this, I haven't done a chaptered story in quite some time. Here goes nothin'.

_DBD Blue Skies Prompt #31:_

_Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling_  
><em>From glen to glen, and down the mountain side<em>  
><em>The summer's gone, and all the roses falling<em>  
><em>'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.<em>

* * *

><p>A whole year.<p>

It was fall again, and raining feebly. The sunset was belligerently orange beneath storm clouds, reflected and refracted in the glass of skyscrapers and the water beaded on marble and granite.

Karrin hadn't been here in ages. Not since he had taken down Kravos. Not since they had put that bastard in the ground.

It had been raining then, too.

Butters had asked her to go with him. It was a Jewish thing, he'd said, marking the anniversary of a death. They drove to the cemetery together and cleaned a few fallen leaves from around the open, empty grave. There were a few things left at the base of the headstone—a little plastic dinosaur, a faded Polaroid and a plain silver ring that, when she saw it from the corner of her eye, seemed to glow faintly pink, independent of the evening light.

The ME had brought a brown paper bag, from which he drew a stumpy white candle and a grinning jack-o-lantern carved out of a pie pumpkin. He assembled it next to the marker, lit the candle and stepped back to stand next to her.

Karrin nodded approvingly, lips set in a tight smile. She still held her offering in chilled fingers; a dozen red roses wrapped in green paper. Butters hadn't questioned her when she came out to the car with flowers in hand, though she had seen his curious glance. She didn't explain that it wasn't a romantic gesture so much as an inside joke.

Harry had sent her roses once, when they ended up in the ICU together. She had thrown them in his face. That had been a long time ago, longer than she really liked to think about, but she could still hear his laughter ringing down the hospital corridor.

"I think I'll stay a while."

"Are you sure?" the ME asked. She nodded. He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder and left.

Karrin looked around, as if to make sure no one was watching, then sat in the yellowed grass next to the marble marker. She pulled her knees against her chest and wrapped her arms around them, huddled beneath her Cubs jacket.

Thunder rumbled encouragingly overhead, but it took every last scrap of courage she had to speak aloud.

"Hey. It's me. Sorry to keep you waiting."

The silence that followed was almost a tangible object, heavy and suffocating. She drew in a shuddering breath, pushing damp hair from her face. This was supposed to be cathartic. This was supposed to make her feel better, supposed to be closure.

The flame of the candle flickered mockingly behind the eyes of the jack-o-lantern.

Numbly, her hands went to her neck and loosened the clasp of something she had worn longer than either of her wedding rings – a strand of black leather with a little silver shield hanging from it, part key to an apartment, part tracking device.

She could clearly remember the day he'd given it to her, randomly, while they were sitting in traffic. He'd said it was a replacement for the wooden one he'd given her the year before, a shield 'because you're a cop, haha, geddit?'

She had seen the empty spot on the bracelet he wore, though, and either it meant a lot or it meant nothing at all, and she'd never had the nerve to ask.

Too late now.

Karrin stared at it for a moment before she dropped the amulet onto the wet stone. She put the flowers next to it, trying not to look into the shadowy depths of the open grave that yawned a few inches from her feet.

"Things have been – well, to tell the truth, it's been really, uh. Really fucking boring. I don't know how you always managed to make mortal peril seem like fun, but it's not the same without you. So…yeah."

The rain began to fall more heavily as the sun hesitated on the horizon.

"Um…I've been teaching the Carpenter kids self-defense. Charity made them these little uniforms and everything. The newest one, she's a good kid. Has a bit of an attitude problem, though, which I think is hereditary. And a talent for groin kicks, but I taught her that."

This lopsided conversation was more painful than she had expected – she felt she would have given anything to hear a wiseass comeback or some ridiculous non sequitur, but the night remained as silent and empty as the cemetery plot on which she sat.

"We miss you – I miss you. A lot. See there, I said it. I'm not the heartless bitch everybody claims."

She picked up the Polaroid and smoothed a crease out of one corner, just to have something to do with her hands. The picture had been blurry before it had been left out in the elements, but it was definitely Harry, and even on paper his grin was contagious.

She bit her lip and left the photo where she found it.

"I put on the boots. You remember that," she said, and sank into the memory as it conjured up a warm summer night and a Walmart parking lot "I lied. It's been hell without you. You always made it look so easy, and I don't know h-how much more I can take. I'm so tired."

The tears she had been fighting finally spilled over and her face tipped into her hands. When she spoke again, her voice was louder, torn from her like a bandage from a wound.

"Did you think I wouldn't figure it out?"

It had started with a feeling she'd had since stepping onto the boat to find nothing but blood and a bullet hole. It had been easier to ignore her uncertainties while the world was coming apart at the seams, easier to put it all aside and focus on fighting. She had spent the better part of six months in utter denial, running the show from behind a façade of stoicism and convincing herself that he'd walk in the door any moment.

And then, as suddenly as he had disappeared, he was back to haunt her. Literally. Because apparently Harry Dresden was too stubborn to let a silly little thing like death get in his way. But she couldn't believe it – that would mean he _was_ dead. That she'd never see him again, no more smiles, no more laughs, no more corny jokes. No more chances to see if they could work things out, and before she had the opportunity to say her piece, he was gone.

For good.

And while Karrin could spend six months vehemently refusing to accept that he might be dead, she couldn't resist the compulsion to solve a mystery. Her subconscious had taken over the investigation while the rest of her was eye-deep in denial.

_Just the facts, ma'am._

What little evidence there was spoke volumes. There had been no trace of another person on board or even on a nearby boat, no sign of the struggle he would have undoubtedly put up had it been a face-to-face encounter. No smoking craters where a death curse had been spent.

A lot of people had wanted Harry dead, to be sure, but an anonymous hit just wasn't the style of the various supernatural entities he had managed to piss off – the fact that no one had stepped up to claim the kill was proof enough. It had been efficient, impersonal, professional.

Clearly, it hadn't been a crime of opportunity. The shooter had obviously followed him to the boat. Had obviously waited for her to leave.

Whoever had done it had been very good.

Jared had stopped answering his phone months ago. About twelve months ago, if she was counting. At first she had attempted to justify it but the rational side of her knew his silence was intentional.

Part of her was still feebly protesting – it was impossible, couldn't be true because her world would shatter into a million pieces. The other part could see cold, reasonable logic, and she was exhausted from trying to protect herself from the truth.

The rest of their ragtag little group expected her to solve Harry's murder, and since May she had been going through the motions, half-heartedly pursuing the case, even though in the back of her mind, she knew.

It hadn't been easy getting the call logs for Kincaid's 'work' number. The channels she had gone through weren't exactly orthodox. Or cheap. He covered his tracks well and it was a long shot – she had fiercely hoped that nothing would turn up.

One number on the list had caught her eye – one with a Chicago area code. One of St. Mary's many phone lines, according to Google. The date matched the day they had left for Mexico.

Karrin still didn't know the specifics of what had happened between the fire at Harry's apartment and the vampire attack on the FBI building. Sanya said that he'd been hurt pretty badly, that they had gone to the church, and that Harry had made a deal with Mab.

Mab, whom he had previously tried so hard to avoid because a deal with her was tantamount to selling your soul. He had pulled out all the stops to rescue his daughter, called in a lot of favors owed him, and for months she wondered why he hadn't asked Kincaid for an assist.

She'd never considered that maybe he had.

She had almost forgotten how Harry tried to wiggle out of a deal with the Fae before…by almost killing himself. He didn't want to be controlled, turned into something he wasn't. He would have rather died, and his words kept running through her head, stuck in an infinite loop.

_I'm not planning a suicide run, if that's what you're thinking._

"I think—I think I know, now, and I'm pretty sure I understand why, but I don't know how you could do this to me. To us. And I don't know if I can forgive you yet."

She bowed her head, equal parts betrayed, angry and ashamed that she hadn't noticed before it was too late, that she had blown off what had been so difficult for him to say that day in Tilly's office.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry. For a lot of things – for all the times I didn't believe you. And for never giving you a chance. I loved you, you know. I don't think I ever said it loud enough for you to hear. I'm sorry we never… I'm just sorry."

And as much as she wanted a reply, she wasn't ready when she got one.

"Me too."

* * *

><p>to be continued...<p> 


	2. Job Security

**(Another Endless) Author's Note: **Sorry about the cliffhanger, guys. Had to be done; this is the Dresdenverse, after all. This installment is set before _Storm Front_, so we're not quite at the inevitable reunion, that comes next. For some reason I'm always nervous about posting, IDEK. And I meant to have this posted last Saturday, but along came some annoying medical stuff and...yeah.

I hope this chapter is satisfactory, I'm trying to work on thematic stuff and the pacing of character development and whatnot. I'm planning on having at least six chapters in this story, and there's a poll on my profile about it, so please check that out if you have the time and/or inclination. It would be greatly appreciated.

In this chapter there's a mention of a favorite Christopher Moore character, who for purposes known only to himself, was in Chicago.

Many thanks to everyone who has reviewed. Keep 'em coming!

_Straight up, what did you hope to learn about here?  
>If I was someone else, would this all fall apart?<br>Strange, where were you when we started this gig?  
>I wish the real world would just stop hassling me<em>

_—'Real World,' Matchbox 20_

* * *

><p>Karrin stared at the name on the opaque glass and sighed. She could have just called, but the address was on her way back downtown and she wanted this day to be over as soon as possible.<p>

It was dark out, even though it was only late afternoon. The fluorescent lighting in the corridor struggled against the oppressive gloom of an October rainstorm. The heater kicked on in some distant part of the office building with a dull hum and the whisper of air through the grates.

She frowned at the address on the index card in her hand before tucking it in a pocket of her trench coat.

Her recent 'promotion' to Special Investigations had, at first, just been a major pain in the ass. She had to wear pantsuits every day, which was almost as bad as the unending paperwork and the crappy offices. Not to mention it was like being stuck on the Island of Misfit Cops – almost everyone there had been exiled for one reason or another. And it turned out 'Special' really meant 'weird as hell,' and 'Investigations' translated as 'let's make up some bullshit stories to cover our collective butts, because honestly, we have no clue.'

Some of the things she'd seen so far could have been passed off as hallucinations, tricks of the light, or worse; people in monster costumes, like an episode of Scooby freaking Doo. Hoaxes. Elaborate pranks.

But some of them had been downright bloodcurdling. And the worst part was she knew she'd been outmatched – random acts of violence were one thing, but this was an entirely different game. It's hard to serve and protect when more often than not, you don't know what the hell you're up against.

Between the mystifying cases she'd had to deal with lately and the legal labyrinth that was divorcing Rick, it was almost enough to drive her to drink. It _was_ enough to drive her here, to the office of Chicago's only professional wizard. His ad in the phonebook had been bafflingly terse compared to the colorful, heavy-handed pages of fortune tellers and New Age stores.

_No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties or other Entertainment._

Murphy looked both ways down the hall, as if to make sure no one was watching, and reached for the door, which swung inward a few inches as soon as she touched it.

Odd.

She steeled her resolve and pushed the door all the way open, looking around. At the far end of the room was a battered wooden desk and a few chairs. A young man sat behind it, his cowboy boots on the desk, ankles crossed. He was holding a carton of takeout in one hand and chopsticks in the other, with the handset of a phone between his shoulder and chin. He looked vaguely familiar; dark hair, dark, intense eyes and stark features that softened a little when he looked up and saw her and smiled.

He waved her in and put a hand over the receiver. "It'll be just a sec."

The door clicked shut behind her and she stilled the twitch of her fingers, fixing a neutral expression as she cast her eyes around the room. The man behind the desk kept talking.

"And it's in your…refrigerator, you said? No, generally speaking, you _don't_ see that kind of behavior in a—did you try unplugging it? Didn't work. Huh." He pulled his feet off the desk and jabbed the chopsticks into the box, which he set aside, then scribbled something on a legal pad.

Murphy looked around. This was not at all what she had expected. The last six places she'd visited had been consistently decorated in crushed velvet, dragon figurines and enough incense to choke a horse. This was just an office, and a spartan one at that. In fact, it was a lot like her own office — dim, smelling of coffee and furniture polish and faintly of Hoppe's No. 9. The ceiling fan whirred softly and through dusty blinds she could see the slow, drizzling rain and the neon sign of a bar down the street.

The weirdest things in the room were the pamphlets on the card table near the door, Xeroxed on paper in a few different colors with titles like _'Voodoos and Don'ts,' 'The Many Uses of Magical Foci,' 'Ogres and You,' _and her favorite, '_Vampires; A Real Pain in the Neck."_

There were a half-dozen yellow pencils stuck in the tiles of the suspended ceiling above the desk and the self-proclaimed 'wizard' frowned as he tapped the eraser end of one against his nose. He was a lot younger than she had guessed, in his twenties and cute in a cheap-haircut, probably-shops-at-the-Salvation Army kind of way.

Not exactly Gandalf the White. And definitely not the middle-aged basement-dweller her imagination (and a day's worth of empirical evidence) had conjured up on the drive across town.

"A Ouija board?" He sat up abruptly and almost dropped the phone. "Not a good idea. Uh, for starters, it probably wouldn't work. No, I don't recommend that. Even if you _do_ think it's your grandpa. Tell you what, why don't you hold off on that and I'll come by tonight and check it out? Howsabout six-thirtyish?" He scribbled down another note. "Yeah. Okay, see you then."

He hung up the phone and stood as she approached the desk. He shook her hand and she literally had to stare up at him – he was better than six feet tall, in faded jeans and a black t-shirt that read _Lost in Thought, Please Send Search Party._

"Sorry to keep you waiting. I'm Harry."

"Lieutenant Murphy, CPD." Karrin produced her badge with her free hand and he tensed. She was used to it – nobody likes cops until they need one.

"It wasn't me, I swear," he said, and when she didn't laugh, nodded toward one of the chairs. "Coffee?"

"No thanks." She sat down. He ambled over to the coffee maker, which made a weak little sputtering noise as he poured a cup. Then he sat down behind the desk, sized her up for a moment and decided he wasn't in trouble.

"So. Officer. How can I help you?"

"Your ad says you do paranormal investigations." No reason to draw this out – she'd dealt with enough loonies for one day. "Do you have any sort of license for that, Mr. Dresden?"

"Sure do," he said, took out his wallet and held out a laminated card. Murphy looked it over – a legitimate private investigator's license. This was promising.

And probably too good to be true.

She studied the card. It had been issued within the last few months. The poor guy had a hell of a name,_ Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, _it barely fit in the deisgnated name spot. His birthday, she realized at a second glance, was on Halloween, and the lopsided smile in the blurry photo was absolutely identical to the one on his face. Murphy handed the ID back to him.

"The 'wizard' thing. Is that a metaphor or something?"

"Or something," he said brightly, and took a long pull from the coffee mug.

There was a beat of silence before she blurted, "You don't look like a wizard."

"My robe and pointy hat are at the cleaners."

The guy wouldn't have looked so freaking smug if he'd met the Tarot reader she'd interviewed earlier; a fat bald man called Madame Natasha, who wore a purple kimono with silver stars on it, had a pentagram tattooed on his scalp, read her palm and told Karrin in no uncertain terms that she was 'fucked.'

She gave Harry the Wizard a level stare. "I'm with the S—"

"Special Investigations?"

"How did—"

"Says so on your badge. You're looking for a consultant, right?"

"How do you kn—"

"Educated guess."

He may not have looked like a wizard, but he apparently took a sort of sadistic glee in being enigmatic. Or annoying. Either way.

"What?" she snapped, before he could interrupt again, "You see it in a crystal ball or something?"

"Those are for amateurs," he said, completely unfazed by her comment. Maybe even a little amused. "I have this thing called a 'phone.' Know how to use it, too – an associate passed along some intelligence this morning, said a tiny blonde lady cop was hitting up the fringe establishments around town."

Karrin briefly considered kicking his ass and decided to err on the side of not getting sued for police brutality. She glared.

"His words, not mine." Harry the Wizard held up a placating hand. He looked like he was trying not to grin. "You don't remember me, do you?"

She pressed her lips together and stared at him for a second – he didn't quite meet her eyes but didn't look away, either. There was a long, awkward pause before she gave up trying to place him and asked;

"…Have I arrested you before?"

"Not exactly. We met a few months ago. North Avenue. The Astor 'kidnapping.'"

Her mouth fell open. The Astor case. The reason she had been given the job at SI. Karrin could still remember everything about that night, despite having tried to erase it with a bottle of scotch. The memory came back in high-definition flashes – a bridge, the damp, muddy smell of the river. The rumble of traffic on asphalt.

A dark-haired man in a long black coat, a little girl and a monster.

A _real_ monster. As if pedophiles and serial killers weren't bad enough. As if this city wasn't sufficiently dangerous. And it had been hell writing a report about what had happened that night while simultaneously trying to avoid being sent in for a full psychological review.

Oddly enough, it hadn't been the monster that had gotten her sent to SI, but the fact that she'd pushed the issue when the higher-ups had edited her report. The little girl had admitted to running away but her effluent family had bought someone off and on the record the case remained a kidnapping. And Karrin had found out that questioning the integrity of someone with more influence than you is always a risky move.

Even if it's a move that has to be made for the sake of your conscience.

"That was a weird night."

"Weird is kind of my thing."

"So I've noticed," she said, and he laughed.

"You don't pull any punches."

"Not if I don't have to. I thought you worked for Ragged Angel?"

"I did, until I finished my apprenticeship," he said, and didn't elaborate.

"That's a tough business," she said, and he nodded. The agency he had previously worked for specialized in finding lost children. It wasn't an easy job. The majority of cases involving missing kids didn't have the neat and tidy happily-ever-after ending of little girls being delivered to safety by friendly police officers...and monster-slaying wizards.

For a moment Karrin wondered if she didn't need that psychological review after all.

"Yeah. So, Special Investigations, huh?"

"I was promoted," she said with a tight smile.

"Ouch," he winced, obviously aware of her department's reputation for collecting officers that asked too many questions or did their jobs too well. "And they sent you out to look for help? SI has never bothered with that before."

"SI happens to be under new management," she said, unenthusiastically.

Dresden raised an eyebrow. She pointed at herself.

"You're kidding me. That's a hell of a promotion to be out doing your own legwork, Lieutenant."

"If you want something done right," she shrugged. "Whoever I hire is going to be working directly with me, so I might as well handle it myself."

"I take it you haven't had much luck."

She shook her head. "I tried the university first. A few churches. Nobody wants to get involved. Today was kind of a last-ditch effort to find anyone who could shed some light on this..."

"Weirdness?"

"That doesn't even begin to cover it. We've had some cases lately that defy all logical explanation. The evidence is almost always inconclusive. The MEs and forensic teams are going out of their minds. We've had abductions, strange disappearances, sightings, hauntings, spontaneous combustions, you name it."

"Gotcha. Nine kinds of crazy."

"Yeah. And I don't know anything about this _X-Files_ crap," she said, running a hand back through her hair. "I majored in Criminal Justice."

"Hence, a consultant."

"Exactly."

"Well." He leaned forward on the desk, arms folded. "What do you want to know?"

"It's more of an ongoing gig, actually. We get a case, I call you, we go check out the crime scene. Say we get another ritual murder, you could explain the details, right? Like what the symbols painted on the wall mean or why the perp used a certain type of knife or killed the victim at a particular time of day? Because I know those things are important to the case, I just have no idea what they mean. And any amount of information can bring us that much closer to solving these cases."

"I could try," he said, thoughtfully. "You're not worried about catching flak for hiring a paranormal investigator?"

"Honestly? I don't give a flying fuck. I'm not out to impress the brass, and if I wanted to climb ladders and kiss ass all day, I'd be a politician. And when it comes down to it, SI is my department. My responsibility. I _know_ there's something dark going on in this town. We've both seen it. And if I don't start closing cases soon, I'll end up without a job and SI gets passed along to the next jerk-off who doesn't care—"

She stopped, mid-rant. He was staring intently at her, but when she met his eyes, he looked away and studied the contents of his coffee mug for a moment. His fingers drummed against the desk and she bit her lip, and then they both spoke at once.

"Listen, I can't really blame you if you don't—"

"Well, I guess I could give it a shot—"

"What?"

"I'll give it a shot," he repeated with a shrug. "Sounds interesting. And I could use the money."

Murphy sat back in the wooden chair and blinked. "Really?"

"Why not?"

"Okay," she said, trying not to look too relieved. She took a pen and one of her cards from a pocket. "You'll need to come downtown for a background check and fingerprinting, and we'll talk about compensation, police procedure, all that fun stuff. Tomorrow afternoon sometime?"

"Sure."

"Two-thirty okay for you, Mr. Dresden?"

"Yeah." He took her card with the time and her new extension number scrawled across the back. "You can call me Harry. Mister is my cat."

When she stood, he offered his hand again, and she shook it. Karrin didn't know if she trusted him, but then again, she didn't trust most people. And she still wasn't sure she believed any of it. She wasn't sure she wanted to know what lurked in the dark.

But god, she hated feeling helpless.

"It's good seeing you again, Lieutenant," he said, as he pulled on that black coat that looked like he might have stolen it from the set of _Lonesome Dove, _then grabbed a tall stick, not unlike a _bō _staff, from the corner behind the coat rack. "I'll walk you out, I've got an appointment."

"Appointment?" she asked, as they walked toward the door. He locked it behind them.

"Gotta see a man about a ghost," he said, pocketing his keys as they walked down the dim hall. She hit the button to call the elevator and watched as he pulled the silver chain of a necklace from beneath his t-shirt. The pendant of the necklace was a pentagram — no, a pentacle, like on one of the cards the Tarot reader had dealt, neatly laid out in a row on a black velvet tablecloth.

_Justice. Ace of Pentacles. __The Magician. The Queen of Swords. Death, reversed._

Karrin shook her head and followed Harry the Wizard into the elevator as the doors chimed open.

"A ghost," she said. "You're serious."

Dresden gave her a sideways glance as he hit the button for the first floor, and grinned.

"Dead serious, Murph."

* * *

><p><em>to be continued...<em>


	3. Graveyard Shift

**Author's Note: **Ladies and gents, what you've been waiting so patiently for – this chapter picks up where the first chapter ended. I meant to have this done two weeks ago, but real life blows. I'm as happy with this chapter as I'm ever going to be, so time to post!

Uh, soulgazes – something that's done a lot in fic, especially since _Ghost Story_, since that book kind of necessitates it. I hope it's satisfactory, I'm just going to say it was bewildering to write, and leave it at that. This chapter references one of my other fics (_Detonate), _the elevator incident in _Storm Front _and the short story _Love Hurts. _I had to put a lot of myself into conveying the kind of emotional whiplash going on here, so be gentle.

Thanks again for all of the wonderful reviews, and keep 'em coming, I want to make sure this is a story you guys enjoy reading. Whoa, gotta go fix those mistakes I missed last night when I was half-asleep.

_I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope  
>For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,<br>For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith  
>But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting<em>

—_East Coker (part III, lines 23-26), T.S. Eliot__  
><em>

_I am with you, forever, the end_

—'_Without You,' Breaking Benjamin_

* * *

><p><em>"Me too."<em>

She had drawn her gun from beneath her jacket as she turned; leveling it in the direction of the voice. By now it was merely reflexive, but even a lifetime of experience under pressure couldn't keep her hands from trembling as a dark figure stepped from the shadows between ivy-wreathed monuments.

Though the sun had set, Karrin could see him clearly in the sepia-toned ambient light of the city trapped beneath the clouds; it was a very tall man in a long black coat. He stopped a few yards from her and stared down at the crimson dot of the laser sight as it blurred across his chest. The little circle of light flickered once, twice, and went out altogether.

He looked up, wearing a familiar smile and leaning slightly on the staff in his hand.

"Good to see you, too, Murph."

Somehow she had gotten to her feet – the legs beneath her trembled but refused to move, like in so many bad dreams. She had known this would happen eventually – something would try to trap her the same way the Nightmare had, all those years ago. She had tried to be ready for it, but how the hell are you supposed to prepare yourself for the day some monster pretends to be your dead friend?

This was just another trick, another demon to deal with. But if that was true, she should be able to run.

"Murphy."

She should be able to pull the damn trigger.

"…Karrin?"

"Who are you?" she demanded, her voice a toneless rasp. It was amazing that she could even speak at all, with her throat choked shut, her lungs on fire.

He blinked, looked around and then back at her, questioningly. He pointed at himself.

"Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Duh."

"No," she said. "No, no. You're lying. Harry's dead."

Dead. It still hurt to say, as much as seeing him now and knowing it wasn't real. It piqued an irrational anger in her – this was not how tonight was supposed to go. She was supposed to say her goodbyes, go home, get really drunk and maybe wake up sometime the next afternoon. It had been stupid to stay in the cemetery alone, after sunset – she'd been all but begging for this to happen.

The would-be Harry shook his head, as if she had somehow missed the point.

"_Was_ dead. Past tense. And that was only merely dead, not really most sincerely dead."

He took a step toward her and stopped when she raised the SIG a little higher. An electric fear rushed through her, paralytic instead of being the means that pushed her into motion, growing worse every second this imposter didn't shift into something bloodthirsty and hideous. He—it didn't change, didn't lunge for her throat and end her where she stood.

With an enormous effort of will, she took a half-step backward.

"Gotcha. Not funny." His smile faltered, dark eyes searching her face. "Okay. Um. Murph?"

"Y-you should leave," she whispered, betrayed by the panic that shook her voice – though she had expected this happen sooner or later, she hadn't thought it would hurt so much. "Now."

Still, it didn't compare to the ache accumulated from all the little things missing from her life, so much worse because she had convinced herself she'd be gone long before he was, that the blessing in it was that she'd never have to deal with losing him.

Selfish, yes. And obviously misguided. Karrin liked to think she didn't have many weaknesses, but he had been one. Was still one.

Harry – the real one – probably hadn't known she had been through this before; even so, there was a touch of bitterness in her grief. All the adoration in her eleven year-old heart hadn't been enough to keep her own father from taking his life, and now it had happened to her again, had happened to another girl who would never know her dad beyond one terrifying memory.

"Karrin, it's me. I promise," he said softly, barely audible over the rain that pattered down around her. "You know I would never, ever hurt you. You know that."

They stared each other down, not quite meeting each other's eyes. He took her silence as the answer it was and looked away, something wounded and guilty in his expression.

Whoever or whatever he was, he didn't leave and she couldn't move, and it felt like she'd been standing there for a lifetime.

If it wanted her dead, surely she'd be dead already. Or maybe it was trying to pour as much salt in her wounds as possible before it killed her – it was hard to tell with supernatural beings, which seemed to range from wantonly malicious to vengeful and petty. It was entirely likely that she could expect capture and torture at the hands of whoever was currently fucking with her, and she'd die fighting before that happened.

Or it was Harry. And she wasn't sure which possibility frightened her more.

Night had well and truly fallen; the storm clouds darkened to a watercolor purple-gray as more lights began to warm to life around the cemetery. The candle in the little jack-o-lantern sputtered and hissed, sent eerie shadows flitting across marble marker and empty grave as the last of the leaves whispered overhead.

It would have been like him to show up tonight. He'd always been a tad…melodramatic.

The fact that she even considered it was evidence enough that she'd finally snapped. The words tumbled out before she could stop herself.

"If you are who you say you are, then you know what you have to do."

A long moment passed before he nodded.

"Okay." He dropped the staff and nudged it away with the toe of his boot. "I can do that, but it's not gonna be enough."

"Enough," she echoed as he pulled a pocket knife from his coat.

"Enough proof. I know it's not gonna be enough because I know _you_, Karrin Murphy."

There was a silvery sensation, a shiver down her spine and a tingling against her skin as he said her name – strange but not unwelcome, quietly demanding her attention.

"You don't know me."

"Yeah, I do. Better than anyone. I know that you share a birthday with Joan of Arc and that the rosary around your neck is the one your grandmother gave you at your confirmation. I know you can quote _Pulp Fiction_ line for line, I've seen you do it, and that you—you sort your M&Ms by color before you eat them. I know that you're a stone-cold badass ninja-woman and could kill me sixteen different ways with your bare hands, but there's always a romance novel hidden underneath the coffee table in your living room. Yeah. I know about that."

He pulled the leather glove from his left hand and opened the knife with a flick of his wrist. He continued in an unnervingly conversational tone as he drew the blade across his palm.

"But I know it's not gonna be good enough for you, even if I told you something only the real me would know, like how you think I don't notice the way you hesitate before we get into an elevator, or how impressively bad you are at firecracker baseball. How the first time we kissed tasted like cotton candy—I know you remember that."

Every word he said ripped through her like the knife in his hand, cut through to memories that bled out in a surreal rush – the stomach-clenched, dizzy feeling of freefall and venom coursing through her veins. Sand in her shoes, the smell of black powder and lake water. Nervous laughter in the dark of a carnival haunted house, his lips pressed against hers, fervent and sugar-sweet and wrong. And right.

"You're too damn stubborn for your own good, Murph, and as annoying as it is, I've always loved that about you."

He pocketed the knife and held out his hand as if he was doing nothing more than asking her to dance.

Blood welled up in his palm, scarlet-black in the half light. Human.

Her pulse hammered in her ears in a sudden lightheadedness, sure that her heart had redlined in its roar against her ribcage. The trained, rational part of her scrambled to regain control of the situation, control over of rest of her, over the part that was cornered and helpless, the part that would never let her forgive herself if she didn't make sure.

"Get on the ground."

The would-be Harry raised an eyebrow.

"On the ground. _Now,"_ she ordered, her voice hard, ringing out among trees and tombstones. "Hands behind your head."

He stared at her, unsurprised, then put his hands behind his head and dropped to his knees in the wet grass with a longsuffering look skyward and a muttered '_Seriously_?'

It took all the nerve she had, but Karrin closed the distance between them in a few long steps and pressed the muzzle of the gun against his forehead.

He closed his eyes and sighed — not a sound of fear but of resignation, his expression tired and sober, sad.

Murphy grabbed his left hand, which still bled in a slow trickle. The blood was a hot, rusty smell, competing with the faint scent of roses and rain and something else; new leather, soap, candle smoke, the empty non-smell of winter. Familiar warmth radiated from his skin and she could feel uneven burn scars on the back of his hand, guitar string calluses on his fingertips.

This was a person, a real one, not some faerie or monster, and the implications of it threatened to paralyze her again. The cop in her – because it was still there, regardless of whether she had a badge or not—shoved the thought aside and found what she was looking for under the sleeve of his coat; a chain of little medieval shields, looking battered and worse for wear. One was missing at the end near the bracelet's clasp.

Karrin let go of him, numbly stumbling over the evidence – it was stacking up in favor of the impossible.

He flinched when her hand slipped beneath the collar of his shirt. Her fingers found another silver chain under his shirt and she pulled it out – the pendant was a star in a circle, dented in a few places with a little red gem held in the center by a glob of gray glue. It seemed to hum with a subtle energy all its own.

She had seen him take down a werewolf with it, once – a half-ton mountain of teeth, fur and claws, killed with a fucking necklace. She had been there when he saved one little girl from a fortress of ice, one from a horde of demons and another from a temple of fire, was there when he exterminated an entire species with a single knife. She had seen him reverse the pull of gravity, for god's sake.

He had done a million things no man should be able to do – he would have brought down the stars from the sky if she'd asked him to do it. Or told him he couldn't.

The pendant fell from her fingers and she drew her hand away, trembling.

"Harry?"

"Cross my heart and hope to die."

And she could believe a million impossible things, but this was beyond her. She knew she should spare herself the disappointment, just pull the trigger and walk away while she still had the chance.

_But they never found his body._

People don't come back from the dead.

_Since when had he ever played by the rules?_

There was one way to know for sure. It was a potentially lethal risk but something inside of her was demanding it, that vicious little flicker of conviction, the ability to blindly, recklessly believe; things she thought she'd lost when he had gone on.

Karrin pushed his head back with the muzzle of the gun, tipping his face up toward her.

It certainly looked like Harry Dresden; dark hair and striking features, unshaven, scars in the right places, but she knew well enough that what was on the outside wasn't necessarily on the inside.

"If you took those from him – if you're not who you say you are," she whispered coldly, "I'll kill you. I won't think twice."

He said nothing, eyes downcast, breathing shallow and rapid. Not a drop of rain touched him, she noticed absently. There were snowflakes in his hair, caught in the creases of his coat.

"Look at me."

"Karrin, please—"

"Look at me," she demanded, and thumbed back the SIG's hammer. The sound was too loud in the empty cemetery, jarring, unmistakable.

His eyes fixed on hers, dark and intent – Harry had always claimed hazel or green, and from a distance they looked that way. Standing so close, though, his eyes were the same color they had always been; a cold and fathomless gray, flecked with an odd contrast of gold that forever made her think of those false-color photographs of space.

Otherworldly.

There was a ferocious pressure against the inside of her head, a flash of something like sunlight and fire—

And then she was standing on a bridge in a hazy but accurate approximation of Chicago.

On her side of the bridge, the skyline rose as mundane and flat as the cardboard set of a school play. The river below was ink-black and placid, offering up neither ripple nor reflection, and stretched out on either side to disappear into mist.

The city on the other side was shadowy, dangerous, half-destroyed and backlit by the hellish glow of flame, the flare of disembodied lightning. The stars above were eerily bright and a too-large moon rose over knife-edged skyscrapers. Shadows fell at uneasy angles to a soundtrack of mad laughter, whispered threats, animal noises. Something moved in the ruins beyond the bridge and at a second look she saw them – every dark and sinister thing they had ever fought and some he had faced without her. Screams echoed and reverberated; with a chill, she recognized her own.

Between her and this stood Harry.

He looked precisely the same as he had standing before her in the cemetery, leaning on his staff as if he had been waiting for her, one hand out like he was reaching for her. Smiling slightly, as if he knew something she didn't. The ghost of a breeze pulled at the hem of his coat.

It was him. Really and truly; she felt it in her very soul, and she knew it was true because they had never really left this place.

This is what he was, where he had always been – holding the line, keeping the darkness at bay.

Harry glanced down and so did she. The bridge beneath them had begun to crack, slowly and silently crumbling away at the edges. In places she could see through to the black water below.

He stepped backward across the widening chasm, to the side with the monsters, the side with all the things he had killed to keep them safe. No sooner had he done it than he changed into a figure all but unrecognizable in a gray cloak and heavy plate armor rimed with frost, drenched in someone else's blood.

Karrin reached for his hand, and in his eyes she could see a vague reflection – something white and winged that wept as she held the point of a sword to his throat.

Her vision blurred, hot tears mingled with the cold rain on her face. Strong hands wrapped around hers and gently pulled the gun from her grip. She heard the click of the safety and the leaden thump of the pistol as it landed at her feet.

Harry caught her as her knees gave out and she melted against him, her arms around his neck.

"Oh my god," she breathed, over and over. "Oh my god."

She wasn't sure how long they stayed that way; after a moment, ten minutes or an eternity, he said her name, hoarse and happy.

"Karrie. Sweetheart. You're strangling me."

She pulled away, still clutching handfuls of his coat.

"It's you."

"Of course it is," Harry said with mock-indignation, quickly brushing the back of his hand across his eyes. "But hell's bells, Murph, you almost had me convinced it wasn't."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I had to make sure—"

He grinned like he never meant to stop and cupped her face in one shaking hand.

"It's okay. Just, you know, tell me next time you plan to go all _Boondock Saints,_ so I can be on a different continent."

Karrin laughed; a raw, unsteady sound, muffled when he pulled her into his arms again.

"I missed you." He pressed his lips against her forehead. "So much."

"Harry," she said when he let go. "You're here."

"Yeah. I am. Glad to see you've finally worked that one out."

"Mort said you were gone."

"Wishful thinking." He shrugged. "Mort's a good guy, I really hope this doesn't ruin his rep."

She blinked at him. "…But I talked to your ghost."

"I know," he said, digging through random pockets, "I was there—"

"Harry, you were _dead_."

"Sort of," he said, pulling a bandana from the depths of a coat pocket and awkwardly wrapping it around his still-bleeding hand. "For all intents and purposes, yeah, but it was never legally declared-"

"And you came back."

Karrin took his hand and neatly rewrapped it for him, tied it. She didn't let go, holding his hand between both of hers, and stared at him, not even trying to comprehend. Her mind was absolutely blown.

He stared back at her – it was an intense, strangely intimate thing, looking him in the eye, even more so when he kissed the back of her hands the same way he had that afternoon on the boat.

Then he smiled sadly and said, "You know. Of course you know."

"You did it," she whispered. "You set it up."

"Yeah." He bit his lip and looked away. "I did it."

The hot, barely-contained tears began to surface again, this time with a peculiar mixture of relief, vindication and guilt, affection, anger.

For the moment, at least, anger won out.

"You son of a bitch!" she seethed, pounding the sides of her fists against his chest though she was too close to him for the hit to carry any sort of momentum. "How could you?"

"Now, Murph, there are some things you need to hear before you commence with the ass-kicking—"

"Of all the idiotic stunts you've pulled—"

"I know you're upset—"

"This one really takes the fucking cake, Dresden—"

"Just hear me out—"

"Do you even realize what you put me through?" she snarled, and had pulled back her fists to hit him again when he caught both of her wrists. His voice was quiet, rough with emotion.

"Yes. I do. I was here, remember? I saw. And if you know I did it, then you know why, right? You know why." He took her face in his hands again and wiped fresh tears from her cheeks. "I'm not asking you to forgive me, 'cause you're right. I did it. I set it up. And I'm sorry. But you have to know, it wasn't exactly my idea."

"Wasn't your—what do you mean?"

"I mean I got hustled. I got played for a fool by somebody who knew how to get in my head, knew what to say to make me —make me do what I did." His left hand clenched, white-knuckled around the makeshift bandage. "That's why I got to come back, though. That's why I'm here."

His words plucked something from the whirlwind inside her head, something she hadn't yet considered.

"How. Um. _How_ are you here?"

He smiled wryly. "It's a long and fucked-up story that I'll tell you just as soon as we get out of the rain."

Murphy looked around, realizing with a start that they were still in Graceland. She was abruptly cold, shivering as she collected her gun from the grass and holstered it. Harry pulled her to her feet and picked up his staff.

She ran her hands back through her damp hair, pressed her palms against the side of her head, still shaking all over.

"God. This is – I need a drink."

"That...that doesn't sound half-bad right now."

"Mac's?" she ventured. He frowned.

"Somewhere less..."

"Public."

"Yeah. I have a one gun-to-the-face-per-day limit."

She pressed her lips together and gave him a level stare, he smiled and ducked his head in that singularly Harry-ish way, the moment completely surreal and inexplicably normal, all at once. She turned, casting one last glance at the open grave, and a warm weight settled around her shoulders – his coat. Harry held out something in front of her; one of the roses from the bouquet she had brought.

Karrin took it and the hand he offered, and they walked out of the cemetery together.

* * *

><p><em>To be continued<em>


	4. Under Fire

**(Please Read the) Author's Note:** Hello again, sports fans. Sorry about the lengthy delay between updates, I've been dealing with some personal stuff lately that's kept me from writing. Thank you for all the reviews of the last chapter, despite my screw-ups. I am but a mere mortal – I get brainfogged on occasion (it's the meds, yo). Forgiveness please, and constructive criticism is always welcome (and preferred to the alternatives). I will go back and make the edits in due time.

A big thank-you to reviewer _laurabeckinsale_ for setting things straight about the soulgaze; it is truly appreciated.

**This installment is a flashback set during **_**Blood Rites**_**,** just after the smackdown on Mavra's scourge. It's definitely more introspective than action-heavy, since it's a character study after all, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

_You can't feel the heat until you hold your hand over the flame  
>you have to cross the line just to remember where it lays<em>

—'_Satellite,' Rise Against_

* * *

><p>It was no secret – Harry Dresden was a lonely person.<p>

His apartment, despite its usual state of bachelor-generated chaos, was cozy and had, like the boardinghouse that contained it and the man that occupied it, a lot of character. So much so that one almost didn't note the complete lack of photos; no family portraits in Christmas sweaters, no snapshots at Disneyland. The picture of Susan and the other things that had been on the mantel were gone. In their place was a plain katana in a wooden sheath, a single Japanese character carved into the hilt. It looked a lot like the swords over her own fireplace, but much older. And much sharper.

He had told her what it was and at one time, she would have never believed it.

Lately, though, she wasn't so sure about anything.

Karrin stared at the sword a moment longer, then turned and walked into Harry's room. His leather coat was heavy around her shoulders, over her black t-shirt, Kevlar vest and underwear, since she'd lost her jeans to an antipersonnel mine in a basement full of vampires while trying to rescue a bunch of kids, accompanied by a mercenary who could see infrared tripwires unaided and a wizard armed with a holy-water paintball gun.

A frown touched her features as she looked around, fully aware that her life was fucking _weird_ and that once Harry snapped out of it, she was never, _ever_ going to live down pink panties with little white bows.

Hell, at least they were cute. And she may not have pants, but she still wore the metaphorical boots. All the same, the injustice still rankled. It was never a _guy_ who ended up partially naked in dire situations.

…Except for Dresden, but she always seemed to miss out on those.

She peered out the door before pulling it shut. Harry was on the couch in the living room, regarding the opposite wall with a thousand-yard stare. His face was smudged with soot and he was pale, but it wasn't the clammy pallor of someone going into shock. This was something else, something awful –not just the extent of the burns, but the way he had shut down.

Most people would still be screaming.

She had wrapped his hand in gauze while they were in the truck and told McCoy to take him to the hospital as soon as they had dropped the kids off with Forthill, but Dresden mumbled a protest – he didn't have time to go to the hospital, not with entropy curses still flying around Chicago. He was probably right, but that didn't mean she had to be happy about it. And it didn't assuage the shivering worry in her stomach, made worse by the adrenaline that still hummed in her veins.

The terror had passed, but when she closed her eyes she could still see the shadowy basement and Harry, tall and dark as Death himself, backlit by fire. If it wasn't for him they'd all be dead. Or worse than dead, she thought, as the memory-echo of Mavra's laugh sent chills down her spine.

Vampire bitch.

She shoved the thought aside and looked around again. It wasn't a big room by any standards. A rectangular window near the basement ceiling threw a shaft of hazy afternoon light across the room. Books were stacked in haphazard towers and ranged from graphic novels to airport paperbacks to a few textbooks printed in Latin. There was a Star Wars poster on one wall. Several half-burned candles sat on the dresser and none of the drawers were shut properly – socks and a pair of black pajama pants printed with old-school _Lost in Space _robots attempted to escape.

It certainly didn't look like the room of someone who could bend the elements to his will.

Smiling a little at the thought, Karrin slipped out of the coat and laid it neatly across the bed, then wiggled out of the Kevlar. She dug through a laundry basket and came up with a pair of running shorts, which fell well below her knees when she put them on, and threatened to fall off completely if she had to move quickly, so she knotted the drawstring a few times to avoid a secondary wardrobe malfunction.

On the shelf by the bed was a Mickey Mouse alarm clock, a can of Coke and leather-bound book— a journal, maybe, with a pen stuck a quarter of the way in. Temptation almost led her to pick it up and leaf through; a major invasion of privacy, but to be fair he had just seen her without pants.

Karrin resisted, stumbling over a pair of cowboy boots on her way to the tiny bathroom where she scrubbed soot and sweat from her face with a washcloth. There was no mirror over the sink, the lack of which explained Dresden's hair, typically varying in style from "I just woke up," to "I just woke up and was subsequently attacked by the undead."

There was no hot water. No lights. No cellphones or computers.

But – magic. It used to be a silly word without a tangible meaning; poison apples, glass slippers, true love's kiss.

It was _real_, and Murphy had been personally educated in the darker aspects of it by a madman's ghost. Magic in the wrong hands was black and corrupting and when it was finished with you it left a vacant place in your soul that kept you awake at night, too ashamed to acknowledge what it had done to you.

As violating as the experience had been, it had afforded her the opportunity to understand Harry Dresden a little better. She knew now why he would face problems completely alone rather than ask for help – power equaled responsibility, responsibility called for sacrifice and it was easier to build walls and burn bridges than to see the people you cared about caught in the crossfire. She understood that magic in the right hands was enchanted sleep and fire that chased away the shadows, a string tied around her finger.

_So you won't forget._

Karrin hadn't forgotten – for every bad thing there was something good, an equal and opposite reaction even though it didn't always seem that way. Even though sometimes they had to take it upon themselves to be that reaction. Even if it meant getting hurt and crossing the lines they tried to stay inside.

She gathered up his coat and her Kevlar and slipped back out into the living room. She dropped the vest in the recliner with her duffel bag and gun belt, then hung up the coat by the front door.

Harry was still on the sofa, a glass of something amber in his uninjured hand. The little gray dog was stretched out in puppy-sleep next to him, all four legs in the air. Mister was on top of a bookshelf, and the kettle whistled softly while McCoy looked through the cabinets. She padded over on bare feet and reached up into the shallow cupboard over the sink, felt around for the handle of a mug and handed one to him.

"Much obliged."

She leaned against the icebox, absently straightening the pizza coupons, takeout menus and one bizarre grocery list as she inwardly debated going to get the last refill on an old Vicodin prescription. Even wizards need painkillers.

She had heard the confrontation between the mercenary and McCoy, though, and didn't want to leave Harry alone with anyone until he was coherent enough to defend himself.

The old man seemed likable enough and it was strange to hear Dresden talk to anyone in a tone approaching respect, but still…

Kincaid was another story altogether. A hired gun, good at what he did, but as far as she could tell he was pretty much the Anti-Harry; shorter, blond and an asshole instead of tall, dark and obnoxious. Seemingly amoral instead of suicidally noble. Obviously as dangerous, in his own right.

…And she was definitely attracted to him – Kincaid, not Dresden, although Harry had a number of good qualities if she was going to be perfectly honest, all of which made him ineligible for the sort of relationship she preferred.

Attracted to him and resented it. The jerk hadn't been the least bit hesitant to get her out of her jeans, which was both extremely annoying and disturbingly exciting. Karrin had been irritated about it, to be sure, but Harry had looked downright livid. The man had a chivalrous streak a mile wide and was all but some spandex and a theme song from superhero status and sometimes she wasn't so sure about the theme song.

He had taken a few good-natured jabs at her lack of pants – he never let the opportunity for a joke go to waste, but then he had put his coat around her shoulders because Harry was Harry and even getting napalmed couldn't stop him from being A Nice Guy.

"Lieutenant," Ebenezar said, turning toward her. Steam curled from the mug he held out, accompanied by the smell of chamomile. She accepted it with a murmur of thanks and felt a wave of fatigue wash over her as she took a sip. He picked up a bottle from the kitchen table and shuffled over to where Dresden sat.

"Here, Hoss." He poured another inch of scotch into the glass. Harry drank it in a kind of reflexive obedience and his teacher stomped back over to where she stood.

"I wish there was something I could do."

"He'll come around. Give it a bit," the old man replied, giving her a thoughtful look. "Are you two—"

"No," she heard herself interrupt. "We're just friends."

But not just friends. No one could be merely friends after all they had been through together. She pushed everyone away, but Harry was the one who always fought past her defenses. For all the chauvinistic teasing, he treated her like an equal. He trusted her, trusted in her ability to take care of herself, had faith in her when her own faith wavered. He made her realize that things could always be worse, though she wanted to tell him he didn't have to lead by example on that one.

He was probably the closest friend she had and the realization that it was mutual stung.

McCoy regarded her in silence for a moment, a sort of restrained amusement in his expression when he spoke again.

"Are you two gonna be alright here? I can do something for that hand, but I need to go get a few things first."

"Yeah," Murphy nodded, feeling her face flush. He continued, pretending not to notice.

"That was a brave thing to do, going down there with them. He's lucky to have somebody like you on his side, and I'm glad for it, too."

She ducked her head, unable to reply – Karrin was far more accustomed to being doubted than complimented.

"That boy's had a rough time of it. Doesn't help that he tends to act before he thinks, gets him in a mess of trouble. You'll keep an eye on him for me? Try to keep him in line?"

His meaning was clear enough – _"I'm trusting you to look after a person I care about, since I can tell you care about him, too."_

"I will," she said, softly.

"Alright. I'll be back in an hour or so."

McCoy gathered his belongings and disappeared out the door. Murphy picked up the little gray puppy and cuddled him in the crook of her arm, then sat down next to Harry. He'd keep the dog, she was certain. Dresden had a soft spot where kids and animals were concerned – something that couldn't be negated by leather coats or attitude problems or the carrying of big sticks.

"Hey, Stilts." She took the glass of scotch from his hand before it spilled and set it on the coffee table. "It's gonna be okay."

Harry gave her a sideways glance that seemed to convey skepticism though his expression hadn't changed.

"Promise," she said, and drew an X over her heart with one finger, but he caught her hand and held it tight for a moment, his head bowed, eyes shut.

Guilt, sudden and severe, weighed on her for the way she had resented her family in front of him when he would have loved to be able to go to a stupid barbecue. What did it say about her that she preferred monster-slaying to family reunions?

Karrin Murphy was lonely by choice.

* * *

><p>To be continued...<p> 


	5. Damaged Goods

_AUTHOR'S NOTE: _First off, I would like to apologize for the ridiculously embarrassingly-belated arrival of this chapter. This year has been kicking my ass emotionally and physically. I did my best, and it feels as if I've torn myself open and poured my soul onto the screen, so take it easy on me.

_One forgives to the degree that one loves. _

_Francois de La Rochefoucauld_

_Look into my eyes and see  
>the graveyard filled with dirt and defeat<br>look into my eyes and see  
>the weight on my soul<em>

_- 'Comeback,' Redlight King_

* * *

><p>The cab ride from Graceland to her house was silent from the time she gave the driver the address until the car turned onto her street.<p>

Karrin asked the cabbie to circle the block once and they stepped out a few houses down from her own, where the streetlight was broken.

"Here." She slipped out of Harry's leather coat. It was heavier than his old one but warm and soft, dry despite the rain and smelled like soap and candle smoke. Cold wind bit through her damp clothes.

He put it on with a questioning look.

"Too heavy," she explained in whisper, putting a hand on the gun beneath her Cubbies jacket. "If anyone shows up-"

Harry nodded and fell into step next to her, silent still but for the rain and the splash of their shoes on the sidewalk. Murphy kept her head up, eyes searching for movement in the shadows. Dresden, of course, was doing the same.

The prickling sensation of being watched never came over her as it did some nights, and she opened the gate onto the brick path that cut a narrow trail through the garden, or what used to be a garden. The roses had grown into a tangle higher than her head. A few stubborn, weather-worn blooms clung to the thorny vines that choked around the porch rails and bars on the windows.

Mister bounded out the door as she unlocked it and slammed into Harry's shins, winding around his legs as if he wasn't at all surprised to see him. The cat mrowled approvingly and padded back into the house – clearly the only one of them with enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Dresden didn't look at her, his gaze fixed firmly at her feet.

He could have sought her out in public but had risked approaching her alone, knowing how she would react. She had been the last person he had seen alive, he knew she had figured it out – that fact seemed to stretch endlessly between them, one misstep could send them plummeting to the bottom.

It would be easy to lose him now, as easy as it would have been to give in to the flame of anger and betrayal that kindled every time she looked at him. Easy to treat him like a stranger.

In the light that spilled from the doorway she could see dark shadows beneath his eyes like someone recovering from a long illness, and she knew he hadn't had the chance to grieve the way she had.

Wordlessly – because she found there were none that applied to the situation – she stepped to one side and held the door open.

"You don't have to – Karrin, I can't ask you to—"

This was obviously not what he had expected and she remembered the last time they had spoken, the mistrust in her words, the disappointment borne of hoping for one thing for so long with such single-mindedness that it had burned her up from the inside.

But he hadn't held it against her, would never have done something like that.

Forgiveness was its own punishment, wounding as it healed.

"Get in the goddamn house," she said softly.

With his eyes still on the ground, he stepped past her. Karrin locked the door behind them. Harry glanced around the living room, taking it in with the practiced gaze of an investigator.

Some things never change.

And some do. The bullet holes from the drive-by had been patched and painted over. The windows had been replaced. Michael, Charity and the kids had helped fix everything and tried to help her put it back in order. She had replaced the frilly furniture with comfy stuff, mismatched and secondhand – it probably looked familiar.

She shrugged out of her jacket and hung it near the door. The thin gray t-shirt beneath was almost soaked through, clinging to her chilled skin and chafing beneath the leather straps of her shoulder rig.

"I'm gonna go —" Murphy gestured toward her wet clothes.

Harry abruptly looked away. "Okay."

She took a step down the hall and then stopped, turned. Her hands wrung of their own accord and she fought to still them. "You'll be here when I—"

"Yeah."

"Okay. There's some food and Cokes in the fridge." She backed down the hall and added, for the sake of attempting to feel normal, "Try not to blow anything up."

The shadow of a smile on his face felt like solid ground after months adrift.

In the bathroom down the hall, she pressed her back against the door and drew one deep breath after another, attempting to slow the rampant thud of her heart. Karrin had given herself over to a lifetime of discipline long ago; she refused to be reduced to tears again, not when there was no longer a reason to cry.

She turned on the shower as hot as she could stand it and left her gun on the wire shelf in the corner, then stripped off her muddy clothes and stepped beneath the water, washing away the cold rain, tears and graveyard dirt.

Her hands shook, trembled with euphoric terror as the enormity of the situation began to sink in – what she had risked by forcing him to look her in the eye and what she had seen there.

It was him. Not whole and not unharmed, but it was him, and what mattered most had not changed. It was that stubborn incorruptibility, that steadfast stand against the dark that had caused him more trouble than anything. It was probably the same thing that had brought him back.

Believing, it seemed, had come through for her in the end, though she'd had to make the first step in utter darkness, holding onto nothing but the frayed end of a faith that had weathered too much already.

Of course she could appreciate the irony; leaping without looking had always been Dresden's area of expertise.

Karrin caught a glimpse of herself in the foggy mirror as she dried off – someone tired and shaken looked back, too thin, eyes red from tears. Her hair was already starting to dry. It had grown out since May and now it was a more severe version of the style she used to favor, buzzed close in the back and longer in the front.

She pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt over a black tank top and tried not to think about how meticulously she had dressed the last time she'd tried to bring him home.

That still hurt in a lot of ways she didn't want to think about – they had been close, so close.

And it had been such a small step to take. What they had, she felt, was deeper than most friendships, stronger than most marriages; something forged in fire and blood...in the most literal sense of the words.

All the hell they had been through together had always left them even closer, more steadfast, but this was endgame.

Make or break.

Murphy slipped her grandmother's rosary around her neck, tucked her gun into the back of her belt and grabbed the first aid kit from beneath the bathroom sink.

Harry stood in front of the fireplace, facing away from her. In his hand was a folded piece of yellow notebook paper – he left it on the mantel. He had forgone the food and drinks in the fridge. There was a small, flat bottle on the coffee table and two glasses from her kitchen. One already had an inch of clear liquid in the bottom.

He sat down next to her as she opened the first aid kit. Neither of them spoke as she cleaned and bandaged his hand – something they had done dozens of times over the years, patching each other up after scrapes and skirmishes.

The bleeding had stopped, and the cut wasn't deep. His hands were rough and frostbitten, but warm in a way that kept her from letting go when she should have.

He had always been self-conscious about his burned hand, and flinched when her fingertips brushed against the scars on his wrist as she rolled up the sleeve of his gray wool shirt. For a moment she thought he was going to pull away from her, and saw that it wasn't a burn scar at all but something like a liquid-nitrogen brand, silver-white, vaguely snowflake-shaped.

"Mab?"

"Yeah."

It was quiet for a moment before she asked, "Your exit strategy didn't work?"

He winced. "Binding contracts are still binding if you don't technically die all the way."

"Technically." Karrin bit her lip and considered the implications of his words before speaking in a careful tone. "Harry. You were a _ghost_."

He smiled hesitantly, as if he wasn't sure it was allowed. "Not very good one. Didn't meet my book-stacking and refrigerator-haunting quotas, so they had to let me go—"

"Harry," she said again, her brow creasing with impatience. He turned away, pouring a measure from the little bottle into the empty glass. He handed it to her.

"Okay, so I wasn't a ghost in the traditional sense. Turns out I was only mostly-dead and mostly-dead is, as you know—"

"Slightly alive," they said in one voice. He raised his glass in her direction before taking a drink.

"So. This is a bizarre question." Karrin pulled her feet beneath her body, cradling her own glass. "How mostly-dead were you?"

Harry shrugged, rubbing a hand across the back of his neck. "I, uh. Kind of like a persistent vegetable having a prolonged out-of-body experience?"

She felt the corner of her mouth twitch. "Aren't you supposed to get those checked out if they last more than four hours?"

"Very funny, Murph."

"And this is the real you?" She poked him in the shoulder. "Not some kind of loaner or something?"

"The OG," he said. "The real McCoy, so to speak."

They both smiled again. Mister leapt onto the sofa and rammed his head against Harry's elbow for attention that he readily gave, scratching the cat's ears. For a moment there was silence except for the sound of the cat's diesel engine purr.

"You're here."

"You keep saying that."

"It's true."

He smiled again, soberly this time. "You wanted me to tell you how."

The cop in her wanted the straight facts in a chronological list, but the rest of her wasn't sure she was ready to know the truth.

"I don't know if I— this is big. Harry, this is kind of…this is a game-changer. I mean, I still don't even understand how you're here."

"Divine intervention. And some not-so-divine intervention." Dresden nodded, mostly to himself. "Should I start from the beginning? Or end? I'm not sure which is which anymore."

Karrin hesitated as she thought, remembering the fragile bridge they had been so close to crossing. "Start...from...the last place we saw each other."

"Okay. The boat. I was out on the deck, waiting for you to come back—" he looked pointedly away from her and blushed slightly. "And then I was in the water. And then I was—"

Old habits die harder than Harry Dresden, obviously, and the teasing tone was something she couldn't rein in. "Mostly-dead? Did you go toward the light?"

"Actually...yeah. Only it was a train and I was standing on the tracks. Right before it hit me, somebody pulled me out of the way. It was—" he paused and downed what was left in the glass. "It was Carmichael."

Karrin felt the breath catch in her throat. "…Ron?"

"Yeah."

"You're serious?" she demanded, even though she had always been able to tell when he was lying.

"It was him. And then we, uh." His brow furrowed, lips pressed into a thin line. "We went to a police station in Chicagotory, and he said that, yeah, I was dead, and there were some discrepancies about it that I needed to work out, and then I went to Mort's place and Mort took me to yours, and you know what happened next."

He was leaving something out, something important. She took a breath, quelling the urge to ask what would put an expression like that on his face, reminded herself that he trusted her and would tell her when he could.

"Then there was that nasty business with Corpsetaker. And then I woke up on the island and my new boss was doing her Annie Wilkes impression."

Karrin cringed as the image of the last Winter Knight, crucified in ice for betraying his queen, crept unbidden from her memory.

He saw her expression and nodded. "It was… kind of awful."

"And that's where you've been? On the island? _That_ island?"

Harry shook his head. "In Winter."

"Since _May_?"

"Yeah, but time is different in the Nevernever, remember? It's only been a few weeks. Felt like a lot longer, though. The Fae have no appreciation for sarcasm."

Dozens of words and phrases flickered through her head as she tried to find the appropriate response.

Betrayal weighed in first.

"Harry. You lied to me. What you said in Tilly's office—"

"I know what I said. But you've got to believe me, Karrin, I didn't know what I was saying."

"What do you mean-"

"Just – follow me, here. I guess somebody told you about the fire, right?

"Sanya said you were hurt. Paralyzed."

"I was. I was in really bad shape, and I knew I had to make a deal." His fingers drummed anxiously against the arm of the sofa. "And that's where the not-so-divine intervention comes in."

Harry didn't elaborate, but when she met his gaze, he nodded.

"The Nickleheads." Her throat tightened her words down to a whisper. "I thought they weren't allowed to interfere like that."

"Somebody on that side of the fence broke the rules. The other side sent me back to redress the balance." Anger began to edge into his tone. "All it took was a nudge in that direction to make me think it was my idea. I already thought that if I signed on with her I'd end up like Slate, and I couldn't – I didn't want to lose myself, I didn't want you to see that—"

Murphy knew what it felt like to have someone get inside her head, to shake her down until nothing was left but terror and hopelessness. It had happened more than once.

Her stomach turned, knowing what his next words would be.

"...So I called Kincaid and gave him the mark."

"Harry," she said, unable to keep the pain from her voice as her face tipped into her hands. He continued flatly, looking pointedly away from her as she watched through a fence of splayed fingers and blonde hair.

"But you knew that already. After I called him, then I—" he tapped a finger against his temple, "I had Molly edit that part out before I made the deal with Mab."

"Christ," she breathed with a sick sense of relief as the jumbled mess of facts and suspicions in her head finally began to coalesce.

"I know," he whispered, guilt in the lines of his face. "I know."

This part, she knew, was going to hurt the most: coming to terms with the fact that he was mortal. Fallible.

Karrin wanted to hate him for it. But this was someone she had loved, trusted, defended and fought alongside, and every time she looked at him, her heart broke a little more.

"You're an idiot, Harry," she said, gently.

"Yes. And?"

"Isn't _stubborn jackass_ one of your middle names? If you think some faerie bimbo can change that, you got another thing coming."

He snorted and took a long pull from the glass."Yeah. Figured that one out a little late."

A silence slightly less tense than before eased between them.

"Listen, Harry. About before." The apology she had whispered every night since May, hoping he could hear her, forced its way to her lips. "I waited for so long for you to show. And when you did, I— I didn't believe it. It's not that I didn't want to. I _couldn't_. I tried and I couldn't force myself believe you were d—until the end, when Butters said you were gone."

"You were right, though."

"How was I supposed to know?" She ran a hand through her hair and stared at the floor. "Jesus. The things I said—"

"Murph, you did exactly what I would have told you to do."

Blaming him could have been easy – it was his fault she could believe the impossible. How could she not, after everything they had been through?

"I thought that…when it occurred to me that maybe you had planned it, I thought—" she paused and and traced the edge of her empty glass, drawing a deep breath, "I thought I had let you down. That I had missed something, that maybe I could have said or done something, anything…"

Dresden stared at her for a moment, stricken, and she wondered if he had put her on the same pedestal she had reserved for him, wondered if he was finally seeing her as the girl who never had anyone to show up for her, and so had to learn to fight all of her battles alone.

"No, that's not—hell's bells, Karrin." He looked away and when he spoke again it was with a voice that shook. "God. I fucked up big this time. This—I know this is difficult and I'll understand if this is it—"

"Don't," she said calmly, silencing him with a hand against his cheek, gently turning his face toward hers. "Don't you _dare_, because if you go all '_here's lookin' at you, kid' _on me_, _I will kick your ass so hard you'll wish you really were dead, do you understand?

Dark eyes locked on hers for a second time that night and the abrupt realization of just how close they were kicked her heart into overdrive.

Shocking, heightened sensation bloomed through her and she could still taste tears on her own lips, feel the almost-painful bite of the stubble on his jaw against her palms. Focus slipped because of the way his eyes drew her in and held her as a complicit prisoner. She noticed the slight tremble of his lower lip when she whispered his name again and breathed against the violent pressure in her chest that made this moment feel as if nothing existed beyond them, that the universe had collapsed around them.

She heard herself saying the words even before they were formed in her mind.

"I never—not for a _second_ did I ever give up hope that you might come back. Not when I wanted to give up. Not when everyone told me I should and not when I pretended like I had. I never stopped waiting and if you give up now, it would have been for nothing." She took his bandaged hand between both of hers. "Everything we've worked for would be in vain. And I can't allow that."

Harry seized her by both shoulders and pulled her against his chest. He sighed into her hair and pressed a split-second kiss to her forehead, arms tightening around her.

"I really hoped that's what you might say."

They clung to each other like frightened children. She didn't know if he was aware of how close they were or how long they stayed that way. After such a long drought of affection, it felt _right_.

After a moment, though, she pushed away, afraid of what she might do if she stayed so close for much longer.

"Sorry I almost shot you in the face."

"It's okay."

Her hands refused to let go of him, though, and she edged the collar of his gray wool shirt out of the way to read the screen-printed tee beneath it.

"Popular demand, huh?"

"It was a gift."

"A gift?"

"Lea went on a shopping spree." Harry nodded when she raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I know. The words 'Lea' and 'spree' sound like 'killing' should be in there somewhere."

"What, no conquistador armor this time?" Karrin asked and bit her lip, immediately wishing she could take the words back.

Harry gave her a thoughtful look, and then grinned.

"That's exactly what I said."

* * *

><p>Thank you for your patience, dear readers.<p> 


	6. Exit Strategy

_AUTHOR'S NOTE: _This chapter is set during the final battle in _Changes._ It was built around another that I wrote for Day By Drabble. I kind of…dismantled it, I guess, and reworked it into this chapter. I've always wanted something from Karrin's perspective during this moment, so I did it myself.

Contains a cameo by a character from another urban fantasy series I enjoy, a direct quote from _Blood Rites _and a line from the poem_ Invictus _by William Ernest Henley.

_Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you if you touch him._

_— Eowyn, 'The Return of the King,' J.R.R. Tolkien_

_Help me find the dawn of the dying day_

—_'Light My Way,' Audioslave_

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><p>Karrin once had some of the mysteries of the universe laid out for her in a Wal-Mart McDonald's, over bad coffee, by a man she had known for a long time and hadn't known very well at all.<p>

He had, in the calm, steady voice of someone explaining how to work an algebra problem, confirmed and then proved everything she had always suspected but never acknowledged except in a sort of half-hearted denial.

It was still hard to accept, sometimes, even though she had seen the inexplicable things he had done, beautiful and terrible things.

This was a terrible thing.

The jungle air was heavy with smoke and the sickly-sweet metallic scent of blood. It was hot but a cold sweat had broken out over her skin, an electric feeling pressed against every nerve ending.

Karrin had not seen combat like this since they had faced off against the ghouls in the Deeps, since the Denarian conflict on the island in Lake Michigan.

This time she had followed him to the gates of Hell.

Her throat still burned from that Other Voice, and she could feel it still, not a pressure or a presence, but a centering. A certainty, a feeling of purpose, something that resonated with the part of her that called for retribution, that revelled in the wholesale slaughter of evil and lusted for blood. It amplified the feeling, multiplied it, turned it into something wholly unstoppable.

Muscles ached but every strike, every step, every parry was flawless. Perfect. Every shot hit home with fatal accuracy. She knew she should have been exhausted, should have dropped an hour ago, should be dead on the ground in a hundred different places.

She knew should have been afraid. That there should not be shapeshifting demons and monsters that steal little children. There should not be magic swords and faerie godmothers.

Yet here she was.

And in their wake lay a swath of destruction wreaked by fire and ice, by steel and lead and the closer they had gotten to their destination, the more she had felt it – his rage, like it was a power all its own, cold and implacable.

_I've never seen a wizard cut loose before._

There was a reason people like Dresden were once hunted down and burned at the stake. There was a reason that these monsters cowered in fear when they saw him.

_You still haven't._

Emotion was catalytic for him and she had felt them all because he couldn't, had experienced every feeling he had set aside to be taken up later as weapons honed to a razor's edge. Karrin knew what it had taken for him to ask his friends to come here, what he had given up to be able to come here himself. Part of her hated Susan for causing this, for denying him something he had wanted so badly, a doubled hurt because it was something she had never been able to give anyone.

The same part of her acknowledged the reason she was here, though she still wasn't able to say it aloud. Maybe if they made it through this...

But her claim on him was baseless, a jealous little thing that she held close to her heart. His friendship was too precious to risk ruining, complicating. What they had transcended partnership; no longer the anticipation of the other's words or actions but a sort of silent telepathy.

Karrin looked up in time to see Dresden plant a boot in the chest of one of the enemy, and she screamed something incomprehensible, wordless and triumphant. Sanya joined in, teeth bared in a fierce smile, and they fought on – it was hard to tell for how long, until everything was silver and crimson and black.

Awareness ingrained from years of training showed her the subtle moment when the battle stumbled, a hitch in the pace of the fight like a scratch on a record. Every flame dwindled to a single pinpoint of vivid blue and she felt what she realized was energy, being drawn into the temple. The violent pressure of the reverse shockwave that followed sent her to her knees along with everyone else for miles.

She gained a white-knuckled grip on the Sword in one hand and the SIG in her other as an earsplitting roar shook the entire temple, followed by a flash of bloody lightning that rent the sky, so bright she could see it through her eyelids.

It burned against her skin and went on for what seemed like hours. There was silence. And then screaming. She opened her eyes and wished she hadn't.

Someone was pulling her to her feet—lifting her clear of the ground.

"Go. Find Dresden," Sanya roared in her ear over the screams, pushing her toward the stairs. "Go!"

She sprinted up the wide steps, barely slowing as she put three rounds into the head of a vampire that reached for her, clawing at her legs even as it died. All around her, they were dead or dying horribly and her feet slipped on stones coated with ichor.

The soft glow of pre-dawn slanted through the eastern door and shadows began to coalesce. Blood was thick on the floor, black and glittering in the violet light.

The form on the altar was a woman, one dark-tanned arm hung limply over the edge, blood dripped from fingertips that look blackened and burned. The bold swirls and points of crimson winding down her arm were slowly fading and –

Karrin tripped over a man's body.

She stifled a silent shriek with the back of her hand, her tac boots slid on the gore-spattered stone as she threw herself against the wall. Blindly, she stumbled out the nearest door and almost ran into a tall, slender woman whose long hair was wind-whipped into tendrils of flame as the first rays of dawn breached the horizon.

It was quieter at the top of the stone pyramid, the wind rushed through the trees and drowned the sound of death, the early light was too pure for the destruction it lit.

The Leanansidhe surveyed the scene with cold approval.

Harry was sitting on the topmost step of the pyramid, in the shadow of a hunched, crumbling stone jaguar. In his arms was a bundle wrapped in the feathered cloak Susan had worn – she could see dark hair against his shoulder.

He didn't look like a demigod anymore. Just a man, tired and broken, staring blankly past the horizon at something she couldn't see. Tear tracks cut clean paths through the blood and soot on his face.

Karrin reached out for him, took a step toward him and froze when something whispered in her ear;

"_Not yet. Give him a minute, that spell was a bitch-and-a-half."_

She put a hand on the P90 hanging by its sling from her shoulder. The voice of Bob was unmistakable – it was hard to forget being hit on by a sex-crazed spirit who inhabited a human skull. She looked up at the Leanansidhe, very careful not to meet the faerie's eyes or let slip her hold on the sword.

"Maggie. Is she—"

The Sidhe woman bared her teeth in a chilling approximation of a smile. "Alive."

"What happened—" she started, turning back toward the temple room. Martin was the man on the floor, she recognized him now in the dawn light. His eyes were open and dull, his throat missing.

"That man betrayed them, gave the girl up to the Red King." The faerie woman inclined her head toward the body on the altar – Susan. "She killed him."

Karrin's mind moved a step faster than Lea's words, piecing together what Dresden had told her about the spell the Reds had set up; a bloodline curse to kill every older relative of a family member. Her stomach turned.

"And then he killed them all."

She staggered to the corner of the temple and was sick. She scrubbed at her mouth with the back of her glove, leaning against the wall as she tried to steady her breathing.

"Does something trouble you, warrior? So many would like to have you. The White God, of course." The faerie tipped her head to one side, tapped a finger against her lips. "Vadderung has shown an interest. The Black Court, though to their own ends. I feel I should make an offer of my own. What would you give me, child, were I to ease his pain?"

As Lea stepped closer, Karrin moved between Lea and Harry.

The faerie smirked. "If not yourself, the Sword?"

With a twitch of her wrist she flung vampire blood from the water-patterned steel of the holy blade and rested the tip of the sword on the stone between her boots. She squared her shoulders and stood her ground between the faerie and her friend.

"Foolish girl." Lea held both elegant hands out toward the bloody chaos around them, taking a step toward her. "This is what love does, little one."

"Leave her alone, you old banshee," a gray-cloaked figure growled as he breached the top step, a black staff in his hand. Lea raised an eyebrow and drifted away, her attention again on the chaos below.

McCoy stomped over to stand next to Karrin. He pulled a canteen from beneath his cloak and handed it to her wordlessly. It wasn't water.

She drank anyway and they watched as a military helicopter landed among the bodies on the ground and departed. Her head began to ache dully with sensory overload, a tired haze.

Everything felt distant, like it was happening far away; she was talking to Harry, stepping from ancient ruins into a dim church with the warm, sleepy weight of a child in her arms, feeling the tremor of her friend's shoulder beneath her hand as he asked her to make sure his daughter disappeared.

Dresden left the church as soon as he could. She couldn't blame him.

There was a wooden table in the corner, a vase of cut roses that smelled familiar. She had brought Forthill a few of her grandmother's heirloom plants years ago, when the Nightmare had torn up the ones he tended on the church grounds.

"You did a good thing today." The priest regarded her with worried blue eyes as she watched over the sleeping girl. "Struck a huge blow for the Light."

Karrin was seized by the sudden urge to confess – something she hadn't done in years.

"I didn't do it for Him."

Without waiting for Forthill's reaction, she stepped outside into the hall lined with stained glass saints, staring down at her in silent judgment. She tried not to break into a run – there was somewhere else she should be.

Sanya informed her of Dresden's whereabouts, though she'd had her suspicions. Karrin dodged the big Russian before he could try to talk her into having a drink with him and made her way to the parking lot. High-definition realizations washed over her with every step; they had finally finished off the Reds. Her career lay in ruins, sacrificed the way she had always known it would happen. She would do it all again without a moment's hesitation.

Leaning against the church wall near her car was a dark-haired, clean-cut young man in a tan trench coat.

"Daniel?" she asked from a distance, thinking he was the Carpenter boy and might know something of Molly's condition that she could tell Harry.

The man looked up at her with solemn eyes, old - much older than any person had a right to be - intense enough to make it seem like he had his own sort of gravitational field.

He wasn't one of the Carpenters, or anyone she had ever seen before.

Or human.

She reached for her gun and he smiled kind of fondly, like her reaction was exactly what he had expected.

"You must be Karrie," he said, and she stopped. No one called her that. Not her mother, not even her closest friend, and it felt almost like the shivery sensation of being Named, but this was something else. Something bigger – the same pull she had felt while wielding the Sword of Faith. The stranger looked her over from messy ponytail to bloodied tactical boots, and raised an eyebrow. "Looks like you've had a busy day."

Murphy stared him down without meeting his eyes.

"What are you?"

He said nothing and she followed his gaze to the ground where the long angle of the evening sun cast an image of feathered wings across the asphalt on either side of his shadow.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph." She took a breath and reassured herself that in her situation, meeting an honest-to-God _angel_ in a parking lot could hardly be considered strange. "Sanya told me this might happen. Look, if you're here to offer me a job—"

The stranger sighed with what might have been annoyance.

"I don't necessarily... play for that team. I owe somebody a favor and I'm here to pay it back." He patted down his pockets and Karrin twitched when he reached beneath his coat. Instead of a weapon he produced a creased and faded piece of paper the size of a playing card. "I am supposed to deliver this message to you..." He checked his watch. "Now."

The stranger held out the slip of paper and she took it. It was a prayer card. There used to be one just like it tucked into the old, worn leather police badge she kept on the mantle at home. The card was faded and creased, printed with a woodcut image of Saint Joan.

Her fingers trembled.

A single line had been copied down in blocky script beneath the typeset prayer. The handwriting she knew as well, though there was no way it could be real — the ink looked fresh but the person who had written it was long gone. The scribbled words were a line she had heard for the first time at the age of eleven;

_I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul._

Memories hit her like a physical blow - the smell of fall leaves and fresh dirt and a few people gathered around a grave, the pained cadence of a man reading a poem. She had been a child with only a vague understanding of why there was no priest, the reason for her mother's tears as a police officer took the card of out the wallet and left it on the modest headstone, then put the leather-backed badge in her little hands.

"How did you—why do you have this?"

"I'm not allowed to say. There are rules."

Stunned, Karrin couldn't move out of reach before the man – the angel - stepped closer and...hugged her.

The embrace did more than block the biting chill of Chicago wind. The cold, leaden feeling of fatigue in her limbs vanished instantly. None of the day's cuts or bumps ached anymore, it was as if she hadn't traveled across the world on foot and taken part in the extermination of an entire species.

In an instant she knew what to tell Harry, how to reassure him after everything that had happened, how to convince him that no matter what he had bargained away, she would never let anyone change him.

That nothing done out of love was as damning as he thought.

After a moment, the stranger stepped away and straightened his tie. "Also part of the favor. Sergeant." He saluted and walked toward an old black Chevy idling at the opposite end of the parking lot.

Clutching the card, she turned and unlocked her car with shaking hands.

The cell phone charging on the dash beeped to life and began chiming wildly as she fumbled the keys into the ignition. John Stallings's name appeared on most of the notifications, a missed call from Jared, about a dozen voicemails from her ex-husband and a few million texts from her mother – _WHY IS THE FBI LOOKING FOR YOU?_

Karrin ripped the phone from the charger and threw it into the floorboard, put the card in the pocket of her tac vest.

She slammed the car into gear and ran every red light from the church to the marina.

* * *

><p>Thank you again for your patience.<p> 


	7. Promotion

**Author's Note**: I feel...awful. Terribly guilty about the time between chapters. I can't let myself feel too guilty, though, because I was ill and writing is pretty far down on my list at that point. But I'm still sorry. *cries*

This story has been rendered AU by _Cold Days. _ I enjoyed the new book, even though nothing happened that I wanted to happen, and I saw the Molly thing coming from a mile away, wow.

This Chapter: This story goes where it wants to, y'all. If you don't like it, I really can't help you. Featuring our favorite meddling angel, who I think, given that he works with Captain Jack on what seems like a pretty regular basis, would get a real kick out of Karrin.

_**This chapter is set directly after Ghost Story.**_

* * *

><p><em>I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,<br>__my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but  
>I shall stay alive,<br>because above all things  
>you wanted me indomitable<em>

_'The Dead Woman,' Pablo Neruda_

* * *

><p>He had come back.<p>

She had waited, prayed, believed in the darkest, farthest corners of her soul that it wasn't the end. Not the end.

Not yet.

And then he had come back. It wasn't what she had waited for. He wasn't what she had expected. Untouchable. Unreachable, and because it wasn't what she wanted she couldn't let herself believe it was really him.

And then he was gone again, just as fast.

There were things she had said that she wish she could take back. Things she wished she had said instead; he no longer haunted her, not in the literal sense, but those unsaid words lingered on, almost tangible.

Regret pressed against her, shadowy and cold as she stood in an office at Saint Mary of the Angels.

Everyone was there – Michael, Charity and Molly. Butters and Andi. Will and Georgia, Thomas and Justine. Father Forthill—they were in his office, after all.

Karrin stared down at the papers in her hands, taken from a used inter-office envelope that he had obviously stolen from SI. Her own handwriting was on the envelope, along with a few others, names and dates. A Magic Marker scrawl across the back read,

_Harry Dresden - Last Will and Testament and Stuff_

After the throwdown with Corpsetaker, she had caved, though she didn't know why reading a will mattered so much if there was nothing left except a dog, a cat and a little girl.

Dresden had written it before the Red Court had burned his apartment to the ground.

There were things he had wanted to give away; a massive collection of paperbacks was to be divided between whoever wanted them – gone. There were optional instructions to mud-wrestle to see who got first choice. His assortment of magical stuff (with the exception of Bob the Skull and the other, more dangerous stuff) to be given to Molly – gone. The Beetle was to go to Thomas – gone. His guns were to go to her. There were detailed instructions for a defacement of the studios of Larry Fowler. A spell to keep anyone from tampering with his remains – useless without a body.

She had asked Father Forthill to read it aloud, he was a lawyer after all, and he did; his voice sounded miles away as he paused to recall a time when Harry asked him to bless a fifty gallon drum of holy water.

As she shuffled through the contents, a folded piece of yellow notebook paper fell out of the stack and landed on the table.

Her name was written on one side.

Karrin picked it up with trembling fingers, unfolded it and read.

_Hey Murph,_

_If you're reading this, it's safe to assume I've finally kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, etc. I am an ex-wizard. _

_So, it stands to reason if you're reading this, whatever got me didn't get you, too. Which probably means I was doing something stupid and my luck finally ran out, or I forgot to bring backup or take my vitamins or whatever. _

_If you're reading this version, we were never an us, and I really hope that's not the case and maybe I just forgot to take this out of the box. But with the way I do things, probably not. And as much as I'll regret all the things we weren't, I'll always be grateful for everything we were. _

_I probably never said that loud enough for you to hear. I know it's a little late for apologies, but I'm sorry. _

_Anyway, don't think about all the times I almost got you killed by trolls and billy goats. Go to Mac's and have a beer for me every once in a while. Keep fighting. _

_I don't have to tell you that. Keep being amazing. _

_See you on the other side._

_Love,_

_Harry_

_P.S. You can have my Star Wars poster. I know you tried to steal it that time I was out of town. You can't fool me. _

Something – some sound between a laugh and a sob tried to tear its way free from her lungs. She smothered it with a hand, white knuckles against her lips.

She knew then what she would do, what she would give up, what she would barter away just to hear his voice again. Who to sell it to, where to go; the entire plan formed as a single thought, instantaneous and crystal-clear in her mind, complete with failsafes and backups.

All the magic, all the monsters were still there. Everything else had been slowly pulled away, as if someone was raveling out the threads of her life until she had but inches left to hold onto, not enough left to hang herself with, plummeting with a broken parachute.

She knew then how desperate he must have been, how dark it might have seemed, so hopeless, knew that she might have – _must have _missed something in his words, in his actions, that she had been afraid to look too close because it might have looked too familiar.

God, but it didn't have to make so much sense. Occam's razor cut deep – there was one person in existence who could have made that shot. One person who hadn't spoken to her in months.

Murphy pushed the papers into Forthill's hands. Her vision blurred but she saw Charity start after her, Molly, as she grabbed her mother's arm and Thomas, stepping out of her path to the door, his head bowed.

She turned and walked from the room as fast as she could without breaking into a run through the dim, wood-paneled church corridors. She walked for what felt like miles, pushed open a random door and stepped into a small, empty chapel.

Sunlight glittered down through stained glass onto an altar; a marble statue of Mary, her hands outstretched in a moment of eternal grace, a hundred candles lit at her feet.

Karrin stepped backward, pressing her back against the door, and didn't fight the tears that burned her eyes, blurring candlelight and stained glass into a riot of color.

It was blissfully silent until the beads of her rosary slipped from her wrist and clattered to the floor. She swiped at her eyes and knelt to pick it up.

A pair of hands closed around hers.

She looked up into the face of a handsome young man with tawny hair and gray eyes. If he had a different nose, he could have passed for one of her brothers. He was a little shorter than average and wore a pale gray suit, black trench coat, dark shirt.

They stood together and he pressed the string of dark red beads into her palm.

He was dressed like a businessman but he moved like ex-military. He had a presence that was...far more than human. Powerful, subtle.

"Who can find a woman of valor?" the young man quoted as he closed her hands around the rosary. "She is far more precious than rubies."

"Sorry." Tears stung her eyes as she blinked them away, slowly moving out of his reach. "I didn't think there was anyone else here."

"No." He turned and walked toward the altar, looking around. "We are never quite as alone as we think."

She had felt a presence like that before. In Chichen Itza, using her as an amplifier.

"Okay." Murphy crossed her arms, arched an eyebrow. At an angel. All the time she had spent with Dresden had definitely left its mark. "Which one are you?"

He turned toward her again and she thought she might have seen a hint of a smile on his face before light, white and furious, burst from the window above as if it had shattered and a rumble of something far louder than thunder shook the floor beneath her feet.

She fought the urge to cover her face with her hands, to fall to her knees. The sound shaking through her was a voice that thundered inside her head, a true name, an ancient name, in his language and in hers;

"_I am The Watchman, called Victory, Sword-Bearer and Light of God."_

The sound ended, the blinding fury died away, and – still standing – she spoke in a quiet voice. "'And God saw that the light was good, and separated it from the darkness.' Uriel. I've heard of you."

He smiled. "And you are just as much fun as everyone claims."

"I didn't realize I was so popular."

Uriel laughed and the sound made her dizzy. He looked her over again as he sat down on the nearest pew and his expression grew somber.

"I saw you fight for your friend at the temple of the usurpers."

"You're not here to recruit me." Karrin sat down next to him. "Historically-speaking, it doesn't go so well for women who talk to angels and carry swords in the name of God."

One eyebrow quirked curiously. "You've done your research."

"And I've seen what fire does to a person."

"I want you to know that your decision is honorable, to recognize that the Swords are more than tools. Some would try to take them up to further their own agenda but," the corners of his eyes crinkled in a way that was strangely human. "Believing in yourself, in your own ability to do good. That's why they're with you."

He was smiling at her like a proud dad. The note was starting to crumple beneath her fingers.

Karrin smoothed it out and tucked it in her shirt pocket. "Why are you here?"

"Some friends asked me to check in on you. Well. More...badgered me into it."

Her eyes snapped up to meet his, wordless.

"Someone you knew." He shook his head. "But not who you think."

"That's helpful," she grumbled.

"I'm only as helpful as I'm able to be." Uriel folded his hands, resting his elbows on his knees. "I have my jurisdiction. You understand."

"So what?" she asked brusquely. "You're not here to show me what things would be like if I had never been born? I thought that was like, the angelic prime directive."

"Mortals and their movies." Uriel cast a longsuffering look skyward. "That isn't how I operate. I am here simply to observe but if one were to ask a few questions, I would be obliged to answer. Within limitation."

What kind of questions do you ask an angel?

"Do all angels speak lawyer, or are you just special?"

He stared at her, very seriously. "I'm trying to help you."

"Why..." she sighed and pressed her fingers against her forehead. "Why _me?_"

"You were chosen because you see truth. You seek it, you refuse to turn your face from it, no matter what it looks like."

"Chosen by who?" Karrin asked tiredly, watching the light from the windows move across the floor, across his hands. They were scarred, like hers. "God?"

"No," he corrected, "Dresden."

It was a moment before she was able to speak again. Her voice, when she found it, came out high-pitched and dubious. "Harry was allowed to make _those_ kinds of decisions?"

"Everyone is allowed to choose the people they let affect their lives, whose lives they affect. Although it is true that the ramifications of the choices of some are rather...more significant than others. I believe he saw in you the strength to stand where others could not. Potential for things far greater than most are capable of. A light in the darkness."

Her eyes blurred with tears again, slow this time, and cold, and she wasn't sure why she said it, but the whispered words burned. "My own family won't even speak to me."

"I know."

"I have nothing left."

"Are you sure?" Uriel put a hand on her arm. "You can ask."

It was quiet for a long, long moment. Clouds obscured the stained glass windows, colors darkening and brightening in a kaleidescope whirl.

"Will I ever see him again?"

"Do you believe?"

She stared down at the rosary still clutched in her fingers. She had felt it for a while, the things she had thought were faith falling away like ash.

"Not in dogma. Not in religion." He held out his empty hands. "Faith is something that can exist entirely outside of those, because of what it is."

"The substance of things hoped for," she murmured, "the evidence of things not seen."

"_Never_ underestimate the power of that."

What was it that Dresden had always said? That what put the power behind magic was belief in it. This was all his fault, he was the one who had given her the ability to believe the unbelievable.

It was his fault that she couldn't let go.

His fault that she could not convince herself that this wasn't how it was going to end. They were supposed to go out together, in a blaze of glory, in one for the record books.

Now the shadows beneath her eyes weren't washing away, her life was killing her by inches, tightening down like the knot of a noose and the only thought that kept her going was that this was not how their story was going to end.

"I can't say goodbye. I won't—"

"Morning is coming," said the Watchman. "But so is the night."

When she turned to ask what the hell he meant by that, he was gone, leaving her as alone and confused as she had been before.

Smoke still curled from the blackened wicks of the votives on the altar, blown out in the storm of light and sound and she watched as a single candle at Mary's feet flickered to life on its own.

She didn't remember driving from St. Mary's, picking up her rifle from the Einherjar that had repaired it. She didn't remember going home.

An hour later she found herself sitting in the middle of her bedroom floor, going through the contraband cached beneath the loose floorboards; her illegal guns, the things she'd taken from Thomas's boat before anyone else had shown up. The Swords. The few things of Dresden's she had been able to collect.

Two manila folders tied together with a piece of string lay in the bottom of the gap between floor joists – she pushed everything else out of the way and took those and the Sword of Faith, dropping the boards back into place.

She set the sword in the rack on the mantel and left the note he had written her beneath it.

Numbly, she made a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table, unwinding the string that held the folders together. One had been left for her at Mac's by John – a copy of all the info from the investigation. Very illegal of him.

The other folder was one she had swiped from the FBI building right after the vampires had attacked. Rudolph had lost it, Tilly was trying to hold it together, Harry had been organizing the escape and she had swiped the file from the table and smuggled it out by shoving it into the back of her belt, beneath her jacket.

It wasn't the original copy of the information, but at least she knew what they had.

The first page was a profile and dossier, a list of known associates; her name was at the top, with Will and Georgia, Butters, Susan and a few others. Next were driving and arrest records. A few mugshots from being booked – pissed off scowls, some of it she had signed herself.

She had never looked this far through the file before. Karrin thumbed through to the very bottom of the stack, to state records and badly-Xeroxed adoption paperwork...and one Child Protection Services report, filed by a teacher in Des Moines.

With it was a picture of a dark-haired little boy, maybe ten or twelve, wearing a Star Wars t-shirt and a hesitant smile. He was sitting in a plastic chair in front of a bulletin board in what she assumed was a classroom or a nurse's office. There was the lower half of a food pyramid on one side of him and a cafeteria menu on the other.

He had a black eye. The knuckle marks on his cheek were too big to be the kind earned in a schoolyard brawl.

Her blood boiled.

She had seen it countless times – how people buckled under that kind of treatment, how it broke them, made them into the people who had hurt them.

She had also seen how strong a person had to be to overcome that, when instead he could have turned on the people around him with the unimaginable power that he used to find lost trinkets and missing kids for ungrateful jerks who didn't pay him enough.

No one had ever made a list of the good things he had done, Dresden would have hated that. Nonetheless, he was the evidence of what she believed; that good could come out of a world that was not, that a person could overcome their past, their flaws, their temptations and be _more._

That maybe humans really are made of stardust instead of mere mud.

Some of them, anyway.

A knock at the door startled her out of her own head. She answered, one hand ready to draw the pistol from the small of her back.

Charity Carpenter was standing on the front porch, holding a pizza and some sodas.

"I thought you might want some company."

Karrin almost said no, until she saw the dark eyes peering at her from around the woman's broomstick skirt, and a big gray dog padded inside and made himself at home by the fireplace. A dark-haired little girl darted around Charity and hugged her before following Mouse inside.

"Come in," she said, trying for a smile. "It's kind of a mess."

Charity followed her into the kitchen, exchanging pleasantries as she doled pizza and chicken wings onto paper plates. Maggie had found Mister and they were playing with a piece of string in the living room.

Murphy tried to hurry and put all the paperwork spread across the table back into the folders.

"I don't want to pressure you." Charity wiped her hands on a towel and handed her the last few pages. "But have you given it any thought, what we talked about?"

There was no way she hadn't seen the photo laying on top of the stack – the look on the woman's face was barely-contained fury. Murphy had seen it before, when they were storming Arctis Tor and the woman was dressed in chainmail, carrying a warhammer.

There was a reason Maggie was with the Carpenters. Karrin hadn't had to ask the Carpenters. They had showed up.

Of course, it had taken a while for the girl to talk. Longer for her to smile. Soon enough she was playing with the other kids, mimicking their Chicago accents, laughing. Healing.

"I will. If you're sure."

Michael had asked her to be the girl's godmother. He had asked her months ago.

"Of course we're sure," the woman said, handing her a plate of pizza. "I can't think of anyone better suited to handle—"

"You look _beautiful_."

They turned toward the living room. Maggie was sitting in the middle of the floor. The girl had undoubtedly inherited her father's fashion sense – her sneakers were each a different color and she wore a Spiderman t-shirt, striped scarf and a yellow raincoat.

She had gone through Charity's handbag and was applying pink lipstick to Mouse's patient face. The dog gave them a sideways look that was an obvious plea for help.

"The...situation."

Charity had brought a movie, some cartoon fairy tale, cleaned up and watered-down Disney-style, and it held absolutely no interest for the little girl as they ate dinner and chatted.

Maggie held up one of the leather-bound photo albums from the shelf under the new coffee table. "Can I look at your pictures?"

"Sure."

The little girl settled in close to her on the sofa, cracked the book open and started asking questions.

"Who's this?'

"My first husband. He died."

"Oh," she said, and her expression was all Dresden, apologizing as if it was her own fault. "I'm sorry."

Karrin ruffled her hair. "It's okay."

"This guy?"

"Older brother."

"Y él?" The girl pointed at another picture, dark eyes sparkling.

"Second husband." Karrin knew just enough Spanish to get by on the force. She had to think about it. "Um. Segundo."

"Did he die, too?"

"No, he's just an idiot."

Charity shot her a half-reproving, half-smiling look over her can of Diet Coke.

"It's true," Murphy muttered as she pulled a piece of pepperoni off her pizza and tossed it to Mouse.

"Your dress is pretty, though," Maggie said, consolingly. "Is this you?"

She was pointing at a picture on the next page, an old, faded photo of a little girl with a blonde ponytail, wearing a white karate _gi_.

"Yeah. That's me."

"Maybe..." She bit her lip, looking much older than she was, a line of worry creasing her brow. "Maybe you could teach me? That way if the bad people come back, I could help you fight."

The girl very rarely talked about what had happened when the vampires had taken her, and hardly ever outside of her sessions with Georgia, though Maggie still wasn't aware she was talking to an actual shrink.

Karrin never told the girl that everything was going to be okay; how could anything be okay after she had been through?

But it would get _better_.

There was no changing who she was, who her parents were; she would never have a normal life. Someday she'd have questions and she needed to be able to handle the answers.

Someday, she might have the same kind of power as her father – Murphy couldn't help much with the hows of magic, but she could give her a jumpstart on the whens and whys. Someday another threat might figure out who she is and Karrin might not be around for a rescue.

"If that's something you want, I'd be glad to." She smiled around the knife in her heart. Harry had entrusted her with something vastly more important to him than magic swords and reading a will, and the last thing he had given her was something she never thought she would have. "That's if Charity says it's alright."

Maggie turned toward the older woman eagerly.

"It's alright with me," said Charity. She nodded, but it was at Karrin, a subtle moment of understanding.

The girl clapped her hands excitedly and jumped up, throwing wild, jabby punches around.

"Maggie," she said softly, as she tucked the picture of the little boy with the black eye next to the picture of herself and closed the book. "If you're going to learn, you have to follow the rules."

"Rules?"

"Number one: we only fight to protect ourselves or other people from harm."

In those dark eyes there is a fire that she recognizes. Karrin remembered the enthusiasm of that age too well – she had broken her fist on a kid's face for the things he had said after word had gotten out that her father had shot himself.

The next day her mother had transferred her to a public school.

"Rule number two." Karrin took the girl's hand and fixed the curl of her fingers into a proper fist. "Thumbs on the outside."

* * *

><p>Thanks for sticking around with a terrible chapters to go.<p> 


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